Privately-owned Delivers Similar Quality to Community-owned

Privately-owned Early Childhood Education delivers similar quality to Community-owned

The Early Childhood Council has expressed anger at ‘untrue’ NZEI news releases ‘taking lame little pot shots’ at private providers of quality early childhood education.

The statement follows the NZEI’s most recent news release calling for an inquiry into the quality of ‘market-driven’ services.

Council CEO Peter Reynolds said today (21 April 2015) it was not true that privately-owned early childhood education was inferior to community-owned early childhood education, as the NZEI had claimed and reclaimed.

The NZEI had been told exactly this by ERO as recently as 31 March, he said.

‘In a letter, written on this date to the NZEI, ERO’s Chief Executive wrote: “Education and care services, regardless of ownership were found to be performing to a very similar trend”,’ Mr Reynolds said.

And this ‘trend’ indicated, according to ERO, that around 85% of both community-owned and privately-owned ECE centres were ‘well placed’ or ‘very well placed’.

In fact, said Mr Reynolds, for the period addressed in the ERO letter (01 July 2013 to 09 February 2015), privately-owned centres slightly out-performed community-owned centres. (86.4% to 85.3%)

The NZEI seemed, he said, to be able to get away with a pretense of concern for children when its raison d’etre was the industrial advancement of teachers.

Its ‘fantasy’ about privately-run education and care centres suggested that the hundreds of thousands of parents who had chosen such care for their children were either stupid or negligent.

In fact, privately-run early childhood education was expanding rapidly because it was providing what parents wanted, and would decline just as rapidly were if ever cowered into providing what the NZEI wanted.

The NZEI’s record with kindergartens was ‘appalling’, imposing a one-size-fits-all collective agreement on 21st century parents who had jobs that required all sorts of different hours for childcare, Mr Reynolds said.

The market, on the other hand, meant parents chose what worked for them and their children. And, as a result, you could now get education and care for three hours a day, five days a week, ten hours a day, two days a week, ‘whatever you need’. You could have it delivered in a range of languages, with religious emphasis, in a Montessori or Steiner centre, with an emphasis on Maori culture, and in dozens of other styles.

If it had been up to the NZEI, children would all still be attending three-hour morning and afternoon sessions, Mr Reynolds said, and thousands of working mothers would still be at home.

Most privately-owned early childhood centres were run by individuals, often teachers, with a deep love of children, and recent news media statements addressed these individuals most unfairly, Mr Reynolds said.

There were a minority of centres with quality problems, just as there were a minority of schools with quality problems, but the substantial majority of education and care centres offered world-class early childhood education.

Thousands of teachers working in privately-owned early childhood services were ‘sick and tired’ of being told by the NZEI and others that their work was rubbish.

ENDS

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